I've had a bunch of problems with my new computer -- it uses ACPI, but if I
load the ACPI modules, it won't boot; if I don't load them, I have to go
through contortions to get the ethernet working, and it won't power down;
and a bunch of other little stuff.
So, a few weeks ago, I thought, what the heck? Why not try Gentoo? I've been reading about it
since it first came out, and I remember talking with Duane about it once,
and it has a reputation for both being cutting edge and stable. Heck, even
Wil Wheaton's endorsing it... it can't be all bad, right?
I had a few misstarts -- bad CDs, not quite getting how the chroot thing
worked, problems with DNS (which I still don't understand; and Rob
has them as well, so it's not just me). But once I got it installed... well,
I'm impressed.
The thing about Gentoo is, it compiles everything from source. It's
like Debian, in that it fetches all
dependencies and installs those... but it's all source. So it's not exactly
fast. But because everything is compiled, and because you setup C flags
specific to your machine, what you get is incredibly optimized for your own
machine. This 1.6GHz machine simply flies. And the memory usage just
stays low.
I'd like to use it for my server... but I can't really take the server down
at this point when it's making both my mom and myself money. But what a
great system... I only wish I'd used it for the mail server at work.
